Saint Mum, Saint Doctor and the evil MMR

Television companies are usually congratulated for making plays that might lead to viewers fearing the needle: there's a long tradition of anti-drug dramas set in Glaswegian crack-houses. The channel now known as Five, however, has been strongly criticised for a play that seems to advocate abstinence from the syringe.

The reason is that Hear the Silence features Juliet Stevenson, as the saintly mother of a young boy diagnosed with autism, teaming up with a dashing and heroic doctor, played by Hugh Bonneville, in an attempt to prove that a new variant of autism is being caused by the combined MMR vaccine.

Bonneville's character is specifically identified as Dr Andrew Wakefield, the gastroenterologist who first published findings of a theory linking triple-immunisation with severe behavioural and learning difficulties in some children. Stevenson's role of Christine Shields is less of a direct impersonation, although the stages in her journey - sleepless nights with a screaming child, marriage break-up - are well documented in the parents of autistic children.

Both Wakefield and his case are presented with extreme sympathy. Bonneville is an attractive and persuasive actor - with the useful experience of having helped to make Alzheimer's dramatic in Iris - although his uncanny resemblance to Paul Burrell may work against him in the roles he takes at the moment.

In a key scene, Wakefield, in his glittering kitchen with his beautiful wife, reveals that he has seen a run of children who regressed into apparent autism after having their three-in-one jabs. His lovely spouse, who is also a doctor, warns him that all his evidence is anecdotal rather than scientific.

Well, yes. In this moment, the second Dr Wakefield diagnoses the difficulty with Hear the Silence. Timothy Prager's script is full of anecdotal polemic, and from its first moments assumes and then pursues a connection between the needle and the speechless, troubled children, which does not yet seem remotely justified by the medical evidence.

A series of distracted, sarcastic or conventional doctors representing conventional medicine are systematically shamed and humbled by Saint Mum and Saint Doctor. Scenes in which the Wakefields' phone is bugged and they receive threatening phone calls are casually dramatised, without any explanation of whether it's the drug companies or the NHS or the CIA that is being fingered for intimidation. If you walked into a doctor's surgery looking as lopsided as this drama, you would be sent for emergency orthopaedic surgery at once.

This imbalance is a pity, because the drama has powerful points to score: arguing that the measles, mumps and rubella vaccines, though licensed separately, were never properly tested in combination. And the direction by Tim Fywell - responsible this year for the stylish I Capture the Castle and Cambridge Spies - ensures that the piece, from its shivery beginnings onwards, has a flu-like hold on the viewer.

Hear the Silence clearly wants to be an English Erin Brockovich and - in watchability and performances - it is. But Brockovich's case had been tested in court, and it's a rather different matter to give the weight of handsome actors and slanted drama to a heavily contested article in the Lancet.

Medical opposition to this drama rested on fears that it would offer dubious hope to parents of autistic children and might increase parental resistance in general to immunisation. A viewing suggests to me that neither possibility can be ruled out. Though a fine piece of drama - which makes channel Five, for the first time, a serious player in fiction - Hear the Silence finally owes less to medicine than to spin-doctoring. ·Hear the Silence, next Monday, 9pm, Five

For fake's sake

Television ideas come from many sources, but two of the most frequent starting points are a smart title or an amalgamation of other people's ideas. Bedsitcom - a bizarre new eight-part series on Channel 4 - seems to have come into being through a combination of word-play and format-merge.

Media puns can be approximate - the aim is just to have a fancy name outside the tent - and Bedsitcom turns out to be neither a situation comedy nor set in a rooming house. Its genre is a half-reality show in which three gabby young media wannabes are living in a London apartment block for eight weeks in the belief that they are competing in yet another Channel 4 variation on Big Brother.

What this trio of real people don't know is that the other three fame-seekers are actors performing situations scripted by a bunch of scribes in a secret room within the house. When they answer their mobiles and say "Mum! Hi..." they are actually receiving secret information from the script editors: it's Big Brother crossed with The Truman Show. There has also been a borrowing from ambush-shows such as Candid Camera, as the premise of each episode is that the actor-housemates stage a stunt against those who are real.

What unites the Equity members and the civilians is the foulness of their mouths. There's some anthropological interest in the advent of a generation that employs the phrase "fuck off" as something near to an endearment. If Channel 4 had decided to bleep out the expletives, viewers would leap up and check their smoke alarms.

On the evidence of three episodes, this feels like the kind of programme that is at its best over lunch at the Ivy or in a JG Ballard short story, rather than in the television schedules. The actor playing Rufus offers a brilliant demolition of the sort of halfwit-toff who is desperate for a spot on the box, but there's the inevitable problem when you mix drama and reality that the real people seem limply scripted and badly acted in comparison with the actors.

The reasons that a ho-ho pitch becomes a so-so series are that Bedsitcom is sending up a Big Brother format which became self-parodic about two years ago, and that the main excitement of the idea is the anticipation of the moment when the three fame-seekers discover they are sharing their loft with fakes. Bedsitcom might have worked as a 90-minute one-off with the unveiling at the end. By spinning out the encounter over almost eight hours, this punningly titled series suggests that a more honest title would have been: Flat. ·Bedsitcom, Monday from 10.40pm, Channel 4